CREATIVE
CASUALTIES
In overnight
temperatures approaching 40 sleeping with Betty Swollocks can only be fitful.
No air movement, no cloths and not even the lightest of covering the entire
night spent dozing in a shallow dream-filled sleep. I awake dazed at predawn as
if from an all night cinema showing X rated children’s horror films where people
are transformed into sugar coated icing their limbs so fragile and yet
irresistibly tasty. I visit other-worldly places where a Scottish peat bog
borders soft white sands and mountain crags rise from hot foaming seas, where
giant birds wearing wellington boots and plastic raincoats talk earnestly of
wanting to remodel their ostentatious Palladian abode, and as the tsunami
approaches I attempt to save only the most valuable and rarest from the museum
supermarket shelves.
For the past two
days I’ve been putting up plaster board lining and I marvel at just how fast
Mat can work in such heat, the sweat dripping from his brow as he swallows
another glass of cool water replacing the 15 beers he had the previous night. A
vague smell of something rotting drifts across the back of the house from the
bush, perhaps that magpie I buried a few days back. The speckled breast
feathers joining those of a green parrot, a black duck and a Sparrow Hawk. Bird
road-kill is surprisingly low particularly with small birds given the speed at
which vehicles are driven but maybe the lack of bends means they receive
sufficient warning of oncoming cars. There is however plenty of foxes rabbits
and kangaroos that fail to apply the green cross code and while staying at
Boyup Brook I witnessed a sheep explode on the roo-bars of an oncoming
car. My peripheral vision skims the
verges for any likely casualties and this trip I’ve skinned a particularly
well-marked Racehorse Goanna and a large blue tonged lizard or Bobtail. Like
the one and a half meter long Carpet Python I skinned a few years back these
will go to cover boxes. There is a certain risk in transporting reptile skins
it being illegal even with photographic evidence that it was indeed road kill,
that changes nothing in the eye of the law but to my eye there is a beauty that
I can not resist and that I know I can transform into something
spectacular.
